Wednesday, July 22, 2015

When we have our best ideas

Good ideas are trading higher, and more and more. But, contrary to what it may seem, they do not arise when people feel fresh and rested, but when people are exhausted mentally

Creativity is a rising star in the economy that we live. Good ideas to make the most of the digital economy to adapt to it, to create businesses, to survive from day to day or simply to get out of unemployment are needed. It needs to be creative to solve social problems.

When do you think the best ideas arise, including your own? When it is fresh and rested early in the morning after a good night's sleep? After a walk or a session in the gym? What half of your workday, when you are on task?

Contrary to what it seems, the dictates of common sense, the best ideas, the most creative, arise when people are mentally exhausted. This is what says a research paper entitled The role of (dis) inhibition in creativity: Decreased inhibition Improves Idea Generation, published in the journal Cognition specialist.

The authors Remi Radel (University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis), Karen Davranche (University of Aix-Marseille), Marion Fournier (University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis) and Arne Dietrich (American University of Beirut) - asked a group grade students to play a computer game in which they had to discover the direction of an arrow ignoring the arrows around her. A group of students played a version where all the arrows pointing in the same direction; another group did a version in which the arrows pointing in opposite directions.

Then the students made a series of verbal test. In one, they had to propose new uses for common objects such as paper clips and newspapers.

Well, to the surprise of researchers, students played with the version that required more concentration (one in which the arrows pointing in different directions) were more creative than the other group. According to the article, this is because the tasks that required attention exhausted inhibition of participants, that is, the ability of your brain to eliminate awareness of unnecessary information. It is as if the mental exhaustion eliminate all corsets that limit our creativity and allow it to flow freely, unfettered by our brain.

These results fit with research by Charles J. Limb (John Hopkins University), published in the journal PLoS One under the title Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: an FMRI study of jazz improvisation. Limb studied the brain activity of jazz musicians and rappers and found that when these artists were creating something new, the part of their brains associated with inhibition was calmer.

The implications of these findings are immediate. If you want to be more creative, we must reduce one's inhibitions, for example, performing tasks requiring alertness, such as crossword puzzles. Or take advantage when they get home after a hard day's work and put to work the brain doing something creative.